My Role: Inventor, designer and developer
The original inspiration for Blue came from years of work in Web development, seeing how many of the tools for the design and production process, especially those for information architects, always came up short. In the mid-1990s, I worked with my co-workers at Ikonic to develop a tool called Bravo, which served as an early Web site development and production tool for use by IAs, writers, project managers, production engineers and clients. For several years, I used Bravo on virtually all of the projects I worked on, even my own sites.
In 2001, I became frustrated with the limitations of Bravo and decided to start from scratch with a tool that was much more flexible and easy to use. Blue is the realization of that plan. With proprietary syntax inspired in part by XML and XSLT, Blue allowed me to quickly create flexible templates for everything from pages to low-level widgets, and all types of content, including IA-specific information like on-screen annotations and interactive use cases. It also supported some of my theories of advanced content management and Web site quality assessment.
As the projects I have worked on changed, Blue evolved and in its most advanced versions, I used it to code highly customizable templates in HTML, Javascript, PHP and XML.
